Case Study: Help Family Law

Case Study: Help Family Law

Annie Kelly, of the family law reference site Help Family Law, came to us for help with a visual redesign of their site earlier this year. They had had a technical setup of a membership site created, for parents who are going through separation to get support on the process of separation, finances, kids, mental health, wellbeing and legal procedures advice. Annie’s aim is to help reduce the amount of families going through the Victorian courts because of the way in which they are not fully serving the families – even sometimes resulting in single parents losing their house to pay for costly cases, and much trauma for the adults and children alike.

So, Annie, a paralegal, stepped in with a passion to change the system. Having been through the process herself she has a deep understanding, and is contacted by many people who are facing huge difficulties, daily. Her website is a place which helps redirect those requests for help into a community resource of informational and supportive videos on the legal process and surrounding issues during separation, connect people with experts who are donating their time to answer questions, and feel a sense of community with others going through the same process. Annie also writes direct and important articles on aspects of separation and the legal process, including highlighting areas which are not working and calling for reform.

So there was this incredible resource, which was not being visually represented as well as it could be. The pages were quite long and hard to grasp the importance of the service, and the videos were hard to watch and find because of their placement. We went through a process of rebranding the site and also updating how everything was displayed to a more current code. We chose some brand colours, the light blue and red and white, and recreated each page with a new layout.

Within the Membership site area, we paid the same level of attention to the members’ areas. Many websites look amazing and then when you sign up the member’s area is just not as good as it was from the outside! So we deliberately made sure the members’ experience matched what was being shown on the public site.

Recently, we helped create the Help Family Law video shop – which is where people can buy individual advice videos on different aspects of the separation process. This is meant to make the information even more accessible, and allows people to buy individual videos or the whole collection. It’s a valuable resource, and communicating its value, particularly compared to the costly court process, is important to the design process. Working out the best way to present the videos from a content strategy point of view, as well as technical flow and security with shop systems, and keeping top of mind customer ease and enjoyment, has been an involving task, with testing and feedback throughout and changing the process as we go.

It’s part of the way we like to work with clients where the process is iterative and collaborative, in order to get the best result that is tested as we go by our client’s clients, and their feedback incorporated into how we design.